For Archie McGregor, his wife Peggy and their two children, John and Catherine, another door was opening into ‘The New World’.

The family were leaving Rutherglen behind and catching the train to Liverpool, where they would then board a ship to start a new life in Australia.

The government had been promoting Down Under as the land of promise and opportunity, and Archie and Peggy wanted to give their kids the best start in life.

When Archie first heard about the possibility of emigrating two years earlier, the family were still living on food rations – four years after the Second World War had ended.

The winters were harsh and Archie often had to bash frozen pipes at their flat in Kirkwood Street to get the water to flow.

On the other side of the world, warm weather all year round beckoned, along with the promise of better job prospects, comfortable living, and an exciting new lifestyle.

Aged 10 at the time the family left Rutherglen, John McGregor recalls his father describing Australia as “the land of milk and honey”.

Hundreds of thousands of Britons made the same long trip by boat, convinced that an amazing new life awaited them.

But for many, the Australian dream turned into a nightmare.

John McGregor, now aged 78, tells how he boarded the MV Cheshire with his parents and two-year-old sister.

John said: “The trip to the new land took about six weeks or so, but, during that time, for a 10-year-old boy who had never been further than 20 miles from home, this was an adventure like no other.

“From the moment we passed The Rock Of Gibraltar and entered the Mediterranean Sea, the weather became decidedly hotter, the skies became bluer, and the sun was a large brilliant yellow ball in the sky.”

The McGregors arrived in Australia on July 21, 1951, excited about building a new life in the new world. They were met by the Miller family, who had previously emigrated from the Rutherglen area, and taken on a tour of Perth.

Another lengthy boat trip followed to Melbourne, before passengers were taken by train to Bonegilla in north-east Victoria, where a migrant training and reception area had been set up.

After a week there, the family was sent to Wangaratta and introduced to their first Australian home: a former army camp tin hut.

St Columbkille's P1 picture printed in the Rutherglen Reformer in September, 1945. John McGregor, who emigrated to Australia six years later, believes he spotted himself in the picture (arrow). (Image: Rutherglen Reformer archives)

Just like the hundreds of thousands who left homes behind in Britain, the family were were put up in makeshift army ‘Nissen Huts’ that later become infamous.

John wrote about his family’s emigration in the book ‘Tin Huts And Memories’, and detailed how uncomfortable life became.

He wrote: “What made these huts different from the ones at the Gepps Cross Hostel in South Australia, where we later went, was that these had no insulation inside, so that the steel that was on the inside was the same steel you saw on the outside.

“When the weather was hot outside the hut, you baked inside the hut. Air conditioning was unheard of in those days, and no one seemed to know what a fan was.

“The temperatures in this part of Victoria in summer are renowned for their ferocity. We had days and nights on end when the thermometer never registered below 100 degrees fahrenheit. “I think my mother cried every day for the year we stayed there, wondering what the hell we had got ourselves into.”

Feeling conned by the government and let down in Australia, around 250,000 migrants returned home.

Among them were John’s parents and sister, who returned to Rutherglen after eight years.

John said: “I was doing an apprenticeship, but I did promise that I’d go back when I’d completed it. I never did. I have never returned to Scotland. Now that I’m a pensioner, that dream is now totally out of the question.”

John now lives in Tea Tree Gully, just outside of Adelaide, with his wife Halina. The couple have been married for 50 years and have two children, Kelly and Scott.

With John’s parents both dead and sister now living in East Kilbride, John has only a handful of pictures and some memories of playing in the streets of Rutherglen and attending St Columbkille’s Primary School.

He said: “Now and again I do a Google ‘Show My Street’ up and down the streets of Rutherglen. It has certainly changed.

“What happened to all those cinemas where I used to go on Saturday afternoons for the matinees? The Odeon, the Rio, The Rhul, The Grand Central, The Greens, etc.”

The book, Tin Huts And Memories, has sold consistently well and many readers are from the UK.

John said: “Even after 65 years people still want to hear the story of what their parents went through in an upturned half-of-a-large water tank, where we froze in winter and boiled in summer. No wonder so many went back. This was not what Australia House had advertised.”